NFLPA’s JC Tretter: Players Do NOT Want an 18-Game Regular Season

There is a theory floating around that the NFL has not set a Super Bowl date after the 2027 season because an 18-game schedule is coming to push everything back. NFLPA Executive Director JC Tretter shut the timeline down fast.

"Extremely unlikely," Tretter said of a new collective bargaining agreement with 18 games arriving within roughly 11 months. He pointed to the mechanics of his job, which he took on April 1 after being elected in March. The union is membership-run, and Tretter said he cannot move on anything until he visits all 32 teams and hears from his 2,500 members. The CBA itself is a 500-plus page document of clause after clause. Negotiating it is "a very heavy lift" that does not happen in a month.

More to the point, the players are not motivated to reopen a deal that runs five more years. Tretter laid out exactly what the league has made clear it wants: 18 games, 16 international games, a lower revenue share, players helping carry the cost of operating the business, and a cap on high earners.

"That is a long list of bad things for players," Tretter said. "More work, more travel, less pay, us carrying the cost for billionaire franchises, and then less upside for high earners."

He was equally direct that 18 games is not a foregone conclusion. The players, he said, will not volunteer for it, and the league does not need to wonder what an extra game costs because the evidence already exists.

"Sixteen was a lot," Tretter said. "Seventeen was a big ask, and guys are beaten up." He described post-week-eight locker rooms and training rooms as "the walking dead," the walking wounded, and called another game a major hit to player safety that follows players long after their careers. As a retired player himself, he knows how the body feels.

On the money, Tretter defended the revenue-sharing model that took hold in 2011, when the sides moved from a cap-credit system to true revenue sharing, with players now at roughly 48 percent. He praised owners for their ability to bring in revenue, precisely because players share in it.

"I always kind of chuckle when sometimes the league will sign a new big deal, and there'll be a comment like, the NFLPA got left out," Tretter said. "Nope, we get our percentage of all those deals." If the owners want to change that split, he said, the union's instinct is the opposite: a bigger slice and a bigger pie.

As for the fear of a work stoppage like 2011 or the razor-thin 2020 vote, Tretter urged patience. Five years, he noted, is longer than the average NFL career.

"We are still so far away from a work stoppage, a strike, a lockout," he said. "Nobody should be concerned, because we have five more years of football guaranteed."